Speak & Spell are now a sturdy collective, and have gone on to release impressive, forward-thinking electronic music with a DIY flare. “I wanted a place to put all of it together, and hopefully build a space for artists with an electronic theme.” I was trying to be an artist myself,” he says. “I had already built up this giant group of music friends who I love, and a couple of them were artists. Josh set up his Cambridge-based electronic label when inspired by friends he’d met online through a Discord server. For this <1000 club, where we help a small act get over their first big streaming hurdle, I spoke to the founder of Speak & Spell Records, Josh Fortune. Maybe that business model suits future generations. This is journalism, not content! Maybe Ek has an insight into how the kids are making tunes. It sounds like turning artistic expression into content farming, and as someone who works in an industry that lost its shame over doing that to journalism about twenty years ago, it’s a bit cringe-inducing.īut let’s be fair and balanced. “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” he stated, going on to say that, “you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” As you can imagine, some musicians were angry. Not long ago, Ek claimed that a ‘narrative fallacy’ had been created. Spotify CEO and Jeff Bezos lookalike Daniel Ek sees it differently.

Spotify have a reputation of not paying their artists a fair cut of streaming royalties.

Bandcamp royalties